Material agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach

Agency is a key theme that cross-cuts a wide raft of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and beyond yet it is invariably discussed separately behind closed disciplinary doors. Within archaeology, agency has been characterized as a uniquely human attribute, and a means of incorporating individual intentionality into theoretical discourse. In other domains, however, notions of non-human and material agency have been finding currency, and it is our aim tointroduce some of these themes into archaeology and develop a non-anthropocentric approach to agency. It is anticipated that such a perspective will not only help us achieve more convincing interpretations of the past, giving a more active role to material culture, but also throw new light on the changing roleof artifacts in the present and the future. This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture.

• ISBN: 978-0-387-74710-1
• Editorial: Springer
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 256
• Fecha Publicación: 01/11/2008
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés